[MD] Selective interest

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
...If DQ is experience, and experience is reality, then it is impossible to be out of touch with it. Otherwise you would be saying that some experiences aren't experienced.

dmb says:
Being out of touch means that some experiences are ignored, dismissed, denigrated, shrugged off or otherwise treated as unworthy of our attention. Traditional empiricism excluded a wide range of experiences, for example, and the rationalists distrust empirical reality as a general rule. Like I said, many great thinkers have identified this problem. Your strange insistence that the MOQ's ontology logically forbids it, is really quite strange. 




Steve said:
...So this isn't an answer to a question about metaphysics. It is an answer to a question about whether or not we have good concepts, and that question has nothing to do with our metaphysical relation to DQ which is what it is regardless of what we think about about it. This is a question about our relationship with "DQ" (the concept) rather than with DQ (reality).


dmb says:

Huh? Our "metaphysical relation" to DQ? Metaphysics is a bunch of words. It's just the menu. You seem to be saying that the food is what it is regardless of the menu, that it's not possible for any menu to keep you from the food. But what if you're reading a menu that insists that there is no such thing as food and reality is just menus all the way down? Wouldn't that be a very bad menu? It's a menu that fools you into thinking you've already got the food and it says don't pay any attention to those crazy folks who talk about the scents coming from the kitchen. who insist that there is something beyond the menu.    

Steve said:
If what you mean by "out of touch with reality" is merely having bad ideas about reality, then fine. But what does the "out of touch" metaphor get you other than Platonic confusion (people mistaking you for saying that our ideas correctly hookup with reality as it really is)? Why not just say we need better ideas to avoid that interpretation?

dmb says:
You and Matt are the only ones who ever take this as Platonism. I've explained why I think this makes no sense until I'm blue in the face. As far as I can tell, this is not Pirsig's problem so much as the quirky problem of two Rorty fans that are so fanatically and dogmatically anti-Platonic that they find it lurking under every metaphor, even under Pirsig's anti-Platonic metaphors. 



Steve:
..If "out of touch" simply means we need better ideas, then aren't we always in that position regardless of whether we subscribe to the SOM or the MOQ? The MOQ may be MORE in touch (a set of better ideas), but surely you don't mean to say it _ultimately_ in touch (the best possible set of ideas).

dmb says:
"Ultimately in touch"? Who talks like that? I don't anyone who ever talked like that, except for the odd religious fanatic. With the MOQ, Pirsig says, "Reality isn't static anymore. It's not a set of ideas you have to either fight or resign yourself to. ..With Quality as a central undefined term, reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic.  ...classical, structured, dualistic subject object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. ..It's not just 'intution', not just an unexplainable 'skill' or 'talent'. It's the direct result of contact with basic REALITY, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal." (ZAMM 284)
Let me repeat the main point; dualistic reason has tended to conceal our contact with basic reality. The MOQ puts that concealed basic reality at the center. He says the same thing in Lila, with respect to the hot stove example. "When the person who sits on the stove first discovers his low-Quality situation, the front edge of his experience is Dynamic. ..A 'dim perception of he knows not what' gets him off Dynamically. ..A subject-object metaphysics presumes that this kind of Dynamic action without thought is rare and ignores it when possible. But mystic learning goes in the opposite direction... The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring one's self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static, intellectual attachments of the past."(LILA 116) 



Steve said:
And if "in touch" is a matter of good ideas as you say above, then where does the "taking off the glasses" bit come in? If the glasses are intellectual and social patterns, and if "in touch" is a matter of having better ideas, then "in touch" is a set of awesome glasses rather than having no glasses. It seems to me that you contradicting yourself. You are saying... A. "in touch" is about having good concepts. B. taking off the glasses is about unconceptualized reality. C. taking off the glasses is getting in touch. How can "getting in touch" be simultaneously about not having any concepts and also about having better concepts?




dmb says:

Taking off the glasses is the philosophical mysticism bit. The mystics says reality is outside of language. This is what James and Pirsig both mean when they say there must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality. But words and concepts are true and good and useful only if they agree with reality, to the extent that they successfully guide experience. Taking the glasses of is going to be some kind of mystical experience while having good concepts is a matter of truth of intellectual static good. There is no contradiction is saying we can have a mystical experience AND we want our concepts to acknowledge this pre-conceptual experience or acknowledge the fact that people can have a mystical experience. In other words, there is no contradiction in the fact that we can posit the concept that there is more to reality than concepts. The menu can warn you about it's own limited function and can point out how it is distinct from the food it describes. Having good concepts is like having a good menu. They successfully lead you to a good meal. That's when you put the menu down or take the glasses off.